THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AND THE RELIGIOUS PUBLIC SPHERE

Timothy D. Hall
Central Michigan University

"The will of the Almighty," thundered Thomas Paine, "expressly
disapproves of government by kings." In a voice more like that of
a Baptist preacher than the enlightened Deist he was, Paine warned readers
of Common Sense that the Almighty, ever "jealous of his honor,"
would never countenance a "form of government which so impiously invades
the prerogative of heaven." Paine understood better than most other
Revolutionary pamphleteers that the farmers, artisans, and laborers who
would make up the backbone of Revolutionary resistance were best persuaded
through religious argument buttressed by the Bible. Most pamphlets of the
1760's and 1770's neglected religious themes, airing colonial grievances
and debating proper responses in technical legal and philosophical terms.
Written by colonial lawyers and gentlemen for other lawyers and gentlemen,
this outpouring of print came to comprise what historians have termed a
"public sphere," an imagined, critical, thoroughly secular space open mainly
to elites, where the force of the better argument could win the free assent
of a reasonable public without the aid of legal coercion, political oppression,
and religious traditionalism. In Common Sense, however, Thomas Paine
targeted the hearts and minds of a much broader audience, made up of
ordinary
citizens. He understood that to do so he must to reach beyond that narrow
elite circle to a larger public sphere, a marketplace of ideas framed in
religious terms and forged during the Great Awakening controversies of
the 1740s.

Thomas Paine's turn to religious argumentation as a means of mobilizing
popular support illuminates the complex nature of the relationship between
religion and the American Revolution. Levels of formal church membership
remained low among Revolutionary Americans, and colonists identified with
a bewildering variety of religious persuasions. Yet even among those who
considered themselves enlightened rationalists, most continued to understand
their world in religious terms. Paine himself defended belief in God as
an indispensable moral foundation for republican democracy even while attacking
the "priestcraft and sophistry" of organized Christianity. Thomas Jefferson
grounded the "unalienable rights" of the Declaration of Independence on
the "law of nature and nature's God." Leaders such as George Washington
and John Adams continued publicly to insist that religion alone could inculcate
the virtue necessary to preserve republican government. To be sure, many
hoped that Enlightenment reason would purify religion of notions and traditions
they saw as superstitious, contradictory, and outmoded. Still, most clung
to belief in a supreme being Benjamin Franklin addressed as "Powerful
Goodness."

In ranks below the Revolutionary elite, familiarity with the Bible and
an increasingly widespread evangelical religious style afforded colonists
a shared language, a common set of potent metaphors, and a powerful set of
shared experiences. The transatlantic religious revivals of the previous
decades also bound colonists together with neighbors of different
denominations as well as with distant strangers who had experienced the
New Birth in mass meetings led by itinerant evangelists or by sympathetic
parish ministers. George Whitefield, the Anglican pioneer of this
exciting new style of itinerant revival ministry, had demonstrated in 1740
how to reach beyond the confines of particular denominational beliefs
through dramatic open-air preaching and innovative use of print media. By
the time of his death in 1770, Whitefield's repeated tours of the British
colonies had made him the visible symbol of this transatlantic revival
community.

The itinerancy George Whitefield introduced also became the focus of
protracted controversies which taught colonists new ways of advancing their
own religiously-informed views, defending their liberties, and refuting
rival claims in a public arena. The "Grand
Itinerant" inspired a host of colonial imitators who fanned out across the
colonial landscape in the decades after 1740 and who mounted an
unprecedented
challenge to established religious authority. They preached fiery revival
sermons in "the old Whitefield style," calling on people to forsake their
"unconverted" ministers, to receive assurance that they were God's children
through the experience of New Birth, and to join new fellowships of like-minded
"New Light" converts. "Old Light" opponents of the revivals tried to repress
the itinerants by official means as well as attacking them in a barrage
of printed sermons, newspaper essays, and pamphlets. New Lights returned
the fire with their own sermons and print literature. The controversy embroiled
New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Charleston, South Carolina in
the early 1740's. In the early 1750's a new wave of New Light Presbyterian
itinerancy sparked similar disputes in Virginia pulpits and press. On the
eve of the Revolution a new influx of Baptist and Methodist itinerants
into the Virginia and Carolina Backcountry sparked controversy once again.

The Revolutionary significance of these recurring conflicts over
itinerancy and the New Birth lay not in the insurgency of
pro-Revolutionary evangelicals against Establishment Loyalists, but in the
adaptation of potent new ways of persuading the public to support a cause.
Ardent opponents of the 1740's revivals such as Charles Chauncy of Boston
became passionate advocates of resistance to British tyranny in the 1760s.
Many with evangelical sentiments remained lukewarm to Revolutionary
sentiment or opposed it on biblical grounds. Both, however, adapted skills
honed during the Awakening controversies to mobilize a broad public
response to the burning issues of the day. They had to do so because, as
the historian William G. McLoughlin has observed, the Great Awakening
prompted increasing numbers of ordinary people to consider church and
state as "creatures of the people and subject to their authority." Thomas
Paine's biblical argument against monarchy simply extended what the
Awakening had already begun teaching many to believe: that authority
flowed from God, the only rightful king, through the people to their
popularly-chosen spokespersons in church and state.

The gentry elite who led resistance to Parliament during the 1760s and
1770s needed spokespersons skilled in the methods of the religious public
sphere. They could never have prosecuted a protracted, bloody conflict
like the Revolutionary war without appealing to the farmers and artisans
who made up the rank and file in a style of communication ordinary people
found persuasive. Indeed, the eastern gentry of Virginia and the Carolinas
found themselves appealing for support from evangelical Presbyterians and
Baptists whom they had recently persecuted for not conforming to the
Anglican Church. Revolutionary elites bid for the support of their western
Dissenting populations through concessions of religious liberty. They also
relied on the support of itinerant spokespersons who coupled fiery revival
preaching with passionate appeals to resist British tyranny. Baptists came
to support the Revolutionary cause, but William Tennent III, an
evangelistic emissary to the Carolina Backcountry, encountered stiff
resistance to his Revolutionary appeals among Scotch-Irish Presbyterians
there. Nevertheless, the old Whitefield style of persuasion remained
important to the Revolutionary cause. Indeed, Revolutionary America's most
famous orator, Patrick Henry, called patriotsto arms in cadences borrowed
from itinerant evangelists.

Religion played other important roles in mobilizing support for Revolution
regardless of whether it was evangelical or not. Colonists often encountered
Revolutionary themes for the first time when local ministers announced
the latest news from the pulpit or when parishioners exchanged information
after Sunday meetings. Ministers occupied an important place in the colonial
communications network throughout the eighteenth century, especially in
towns where few people had access to newspapers and official information
was dispensed from the pulpit or lectern. Sunday afternoons provided a
convenient time for men who had already gathered for worship to form militia
units and drill, and many ministers used their sermons to motivate the
minutemen. Israel Litchfield, a young Massachusetts minuteman, recorded
that his local minister keyed biblical texts and sermon themes to the great
events of 1775. Reverend Ebenezer Grosvenor situated the people of Scituate
within a cosmic drama pitting the New English Israel against red-coated
enemies of God, and urged the militiamen who would drill that afternoon
to prepare well for the conflict. In Virginia's Shenendoah Valley the Lutheran
minister John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg concluded a Sunday sermon of 1775
by throwing back his ministerial robe to reveal a military uniform, rolling
the drum for Patriot recruits, and leading them out for drill. Few ministers
matched Muhlenberg's flair for drama, but many throughout the colonies
used their pulpits to mobilize resistance.

Because of its place in mobilizing resistance, the religious public
sphere exerted a profound impact on the culture of the early United States.
Revolutionary leaders sought to fire the imaginations of religious followers
by couching many of their hopes in expansive millennial themes. They cast
the Revolution as a harbinger of Christ's impending return to earth, when
true liberty and great piety would extend across the American continent.
The nascent democratic impulses of the Great Awakening gained strength
during the Revolution, producing a vibrant popular religious form centered
on revival preaching and ecstatic experience. Popular preachers of the
early republic de-emphasized doctrine and mingled secular republican ideals
with evangelical themes, creating a distinctively American form of Christianity
that spread like wildfire even as it splintered into scores of rival sects.
New sects found themselves increasingly free to compete with old established
churches as earlier concessions to religious dissent became codified by
new laws. In 1786 the Virginia legislature passed the Statute for Religious
Liberty, authored by Thomas Jefferson. States such as Massachusetts and
Connecticut which continued to support a religious establishment well into
the nineteenth century nevertheless protected dissenting citizens' rights
of conscience through liberal statutes for religious toleration. The religion
clauses of the national Constitution's First Amendment insured that the
religious marketplace of ideas to which Thomas Paine had appealed in 1776
would flourish, transforming secular Revolutionary ideals and American
religious forms while instilling a vibrant evangelical Protestant element
deep within American national identity.